The moment Nessa entered her house and shut the front door behind her, the silence surrounded her. As always, she stood still in the foyer, closed her eyes, and listened. It was still there. When she’d first heard it weeks ago, the sound had been so faint that Nessa needed days to identify it. Now it was louder—the crash of waves. For a while, she’d held out hope that it might just be the ocean. She asked the neighbors if they heard it too. They politely reminded her that the nearest beach was more than three miles away.
Yesterday, Nessa had heard something new—a whisper that seemed to roll in with the waves. Here, a girl said. Over three decades had passed since Nessa’s ears had picked up anything like it. Still, she knew it was a message, and she knew what it meant. Someone was lost and wanted to be found.
Her grandmother Dolores called it the gift. Before Nessa was born, Dolores had started a tradition that no one in the family dared abandon. Every time one of Dolores’s granddaughters turned twelve, the girl was required to spend a summer with her in South Carolina. Despite their protests, granddaughters had been shipped down from all over the country. Nessa’s cousin Melinda, whose parents were both in the army, had been flown in from Japan. Nessa was the sixth girl to go. Before she boarded the train, she’d met her grandmother only twice.
That was the year she learned what she’d inherited. One night, she’d woken to hear a woman moaning. It wasn’t her grandmother, and the two of them were alone in the house. She knew the sound came from far away, somewhere in the swampy wilderness beyond town. But the moan held such misery and pain, there was no thought of ignoring it. A woman out there in the darkness needed help. When Nessa went to get her grandmother, she found Dolores in the living room slipping into her sandals.
“You hear that?” her grandmother asked the twelve-year-old girl.
Nessa nodded, not sure if it was a good thing.
“Should have known. It’s always the quiet ones,” her grandmother said. “Go on, then. Get your shoes.”
The air outside was so thick, they might as well have been swimming. They could see the whole universe in the sky above. They hadn’t taken a flashlight. Neither one of them had ever been afraid of the dark. Mosquitoes buzzed around but only seemed to bite Nessa. She swatted them away and never once thought about turning back. Her grandmother was a serious, hardworking woman who’d never been prone to fits of fancy. Wherever she was going was important, and she wouldn’t have let Nessa come unless her presence was necessary.
They followed the sound down one road, then another. Her grandmother seemed to hear it more clearly. She walked with a limp—a leg broken in her youth hadn’t been set properly—but she moved quickly, even when the asphalt turned to gravel and the gravel to dirt. They were miles from town, with only a single forlorn house far away in the distance, when Nessa’s grandmother turned off the road and into the swamp.
They waded through waist-deep water that Nessa knew for a fact harbored snakes and gators. But her grandmother charged forward without fear and Nessa stayed by her side. They found the woman floating facedown on a clump of swamp grass. Dolores gently rolled the body over and brushed the wet hair from her face. She had been beaten too badly to identify. Her tangerine dress was torn straight down the front. Its tattered edges rippled with the water.
Nessa spotted a young woman wearing a ruffled orange dress perched in a tree a few feet away, looking down at the body. Dolores saw her too and sighed.
“Dear God. It’s Loretta’s daughter.” She bowed her head and said a silent prayer. “You can go now, baby, I’ll tell your mama where you are,” she called out, and the girl in the tree disappeared.
“She’s dead.” Nessa was horrified. “We didn’t reach her in time.”
“She was dead when she called to us,” her grandmother told her. “She wanted to be found. She would have stayed here until someone stumbled across her. I’ll go see her family tonight. Let them know where she is.”
“Someone did this to her. Shouldn’t we call the police?” Nessa asked.
Her grandmother gave Nessa the same look Nessa had been getting from people since she’d traveled down south—a mix of sorrow and surprise, with a hint of envy. The world she came from wasn’t perfect; far from it. But it was still so very different from theirs. “No, baby. That’s why she wanted us to come. Men like that won’t care about a poor girl like her.”
“Still.” Nessa couldn’t just let it go. “Whoever did this has got to be punished.”
“That’s not our job. There are other women who see to that.”
“Who?” Nessa demanded.
“’Round here, it’s my friend Miss Ella.”
Miss Ella was an old white lady who lived in a fishing shack that her granddaddy had built on an island in the middle of the swamp. You needed a boat to reach her, and given the gator population, it wouldn’t have been smart to leave your gun at home, either. But none of that kept a steady stream of visitors from knocking on her door—and anyone with the guts to visit was always welcomed. She was the only one around who knew where to dig up the plants that could soothe a fever or how to grind the roots that would set an enemy’s insides ablaze. Nessa had met her once already, outside the church where Nessa’s grandmother claimed a spot in the second pew every Wednesday and Sunday. Miss Ella had given the girl a good looking over.
“This grandbaby’s special,” she’d told Nessa’s grandmother before heading off toward the swamp. Miss Ella had no time for church—and wouldn’t have been welcomed inside if she had.
Now, at last, Nessa knew what the older woman had meant.
“Is what we do hoodoo?” Nessa asked as they made their way toward the home of the dead woman’s mother. She’d heard talk of islands off the coast where rootworkers and conjure men lived.
“Hoodoo belongs to the people down here. But there are women all over the world who can do what you and I do. They’ve got different names for it in other countries, but we all share the gift.”
“The gift?”
“The dead call to us,” Nessa’s grandmother explained. “In our family, there’s always been a woman in every generation who can hear them. I heard my first haint when I was your age. My auntie told me what to do if it happened. So I went out looking, and I found a body washed ashore by the river. Her name was Belinda. Her lover had held her head underwater after she told him she was with child. After Belinda, I didn’t find another girl for thirty-five years.”
“How many haints have called out to you?” Nessa asked.
“Fourteen,” her grandmother said.
“Now they’ll call to me too?”
“Not just yet, Nessa,” her grandmother told her. “If a girl’s got the gift, it makes itself known before her bleeding begins. Then the haints go quiet so you can start your own family. They won’t call out to you again till you’re older and you know what to do.”
“How much older?” Nessa asked.
“It’s different for all of us,” her grandmother said. “But one day your life will grow quiet, and that’s when you’ll be able to hear them again. Like my auntie used to say, the gift arrives after the curse ends.”
The dead hadn’t gone away completely. Nessa had always sensed they were there. Occasionally, she would pick up snippets like static on the radio. Once, when she was in college, she’d passed an accident on the highway and seen a young girl standing outside a mangled vehicle watching EMTs working feverishly to extract her body from the wreckage. The girl looked over her shoulder at Nessa as she drove by, but never uttered a word.
When Nessa began working as a nurse in Queens, she saw the dead more often. She’d walk by a hospital room where a patient had passed and see them standing at their own bedside. They always seemed resigned to their fate. Most of the ghosts didn’t even acknowledge her. They knew where they were and had no need of her gift.
One night, she’d stopped to pay her respects to a patient who’d died shortly before Nessa had started her shift. She had cared for the comatose Jane Doe for over a week, changing her bandages and cleaning her drug-ravaged body, knowing it was unlikely the woman would ever wake up. When Nessa reached the room, she found a figure standing at the bedside, hat in hand. It wasn’t the patient but a police officer named Jonathan. He was the one who’d discovered the woman eight days earlier. She was a sex worker in the neighborhood he patrolled. A client had beaten her senseless and shoved her, half naked, from a moving car. Nessa watched from the doorway as the policeman prayed over the woman’s body. He took his time and did it right. Whether he knew it or not, his prayers were the only ones aside from Nessa’s that the poor woman would likely receive.
They were married six months later, and the fifteen years Nessa spent with Jonathan were the best of her life. Then, shortly after their twin girls turned ten, she’d woken up in the night to find Jonathan standing by her bedside with a face full of sorrow. He should have been working late, interviewing an informant in an ongoing case. When she saw him there, she knew he had come to say goodbye.
It was Nessa’s frantic call that led to Jonathan’s body being discovered. Another detective, a man named Franklin Rees, later told Nessa that Jonathan might have been alive at the time of her call. That thought had weighed on her mind for nine long years. She’d been powerless to save the person she loved most in the world.
After Jonathan’s death, Nessa and her daughters had moved out of the city to live with her parents. Both former schoolteachers from Brooklyn, they’d met on a beach near Mattauk as teenagers and retired to the island fifty years later. Nessa took a job at a clinic where no one had cause to pass away, and for years, she didn’t hear from the dead. She thought maybe she’d lost the ability, but her mother thought not. Nessa still had the gift. Her life was just too loud to make use of it. Then the girls left for college at Barnard. A year later, after her mother was diagnosed with cancer, Nessa quit her job. Her parents had helped her raise her daughters, and the time had come to help them die. Her mother went quickly and her father followed shortly after. The house that had once been home to a boisterous family was now silent. If Jonathan had been there with her, it would have been different. Without him, the loneliness started to pull her under.
Nessa threw herself into redecorating the home her parents had left her, but those efforts only made her feel more cut off from the past. She’d left most of her friends back in the city, and without a job, she had no way to meet new people. Back in her grade-school days, the village just west of Mattauk had still been known as the Oak Bluffs of New York—a vacation haven that had welcomed Black families like Nessa’s for over a century. Most of that formerly vibrant community was now buried beneath condos and hotels. The ladies who lined the pews of the church Nessa attended were in their seventies and eighties. Once they were gone, Mattauk and its surroundings would be Wonder Bread white.
Out on the island without friends or family to anchor her, Nessa felt adrift. Her days were featureless, her destination unknown. She tried therapy until she couldn’t find the energy to drive herself to her appointments. She stopped getting dressed in the morning. She let the sink fill with dishes. When her groceries were delivered, she paid no mind to the handsome deliveryman. Aside from her girls, the only person she spoke to was Jonathan. Finally, she decided she might as well join him. Her girls would always have each other. All she was doing by hanging around was eating through their inheritance.
The night she swallowed too many sleeping pills, her grandmother came to her in a dream. “What the hell are you doing, Nessa? You were chosen for a reason,” the old woman scolded. “You’ve got thirty good years left. You need to stay put and use them. Jonathan will wait for as long as it takes.”
Nessa had woken up at four in the afternoon the next day, her mouth parched and her head pounding. She took her first shower in over a week and never considered suicide again.
Ten minutes after Jo dropped her off, Nessa was out the door once more. She let her feet guide her, and just as they had the day she met Jo, they turned her away from the beach. Nessa had a hunch where they were taking her, but the why was a mystery. She’d always assumed she’d know just what to do when the gift came back. Wisdom and maturity were supposed to go hand in hand. Nessa had turned forty-eight in February, and she still didn’t have a clue.
The homes she walked past were all dark. A dog howled and a second responded. Security lights switched on as she passed and off as soon as she was gone. There were no cars on the road. Nessa knew it was dangerous for a woman to be out so late on her own, but she wasn’t worried. Something had told her to leave her pepper spray and penknife behind. That night, no harm would come her way.
Nessa’s destination appeared on a slight rise ahead of her. The moon hovered just above the jungle that had overtaken the infamous Osborne home. Leaves of every size and description glowed with its silvery light. A dense border of brambles repelled all intruders and shielded the garden from prying eyes. Nessa walked toward the property line and stopped at the thorny barricade. For the life of her, she couldn’t seem to find a way through.
“Hello,” said a woman from somewhere on the other side of the brambles. “Are you here to see me?”
“I think so,” Nessa replied. “Is this a bad time?”
“No, not at all,” the woman assured her, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Her voice made Nessa think of rich dirt and golden honey. “I’m just doing a bit of gardening.”
“You usually garden this late?” Nessa asked.
“Some plants prefer moonlight. Some people do, too.”
It made perfect sense to her. “My grandmother was like that,” Nessa said. “She never did own a flashlight.” When lightbulbs in her house would burn out, she wouldn’t bother to replace them for weeks at a time.
“And you? You don’t strike me as someone who’s afraid of the dark.” Harriett sounded as if she might be grinning.
“No,” Nessa told her. “Never have been.”
“Nor have I. Would you like me to show you my garden?”
“Yes, please.” Nessa felt a rush of childlike excitement, as though she’d been invited to tour a magical world.
“Then come on through. Just step over the brambles. I know they look bloodthirsty, but I swear they won’t bite.”
Since the night she and her grandmother had found the dead woman, Nessa had always felt the cool calm of the graveyard. When she’d encountered Jo, she had been drawn to her warmth. Together, they balanced each other out. This woman was different—far more powerful and less controlled. She pulled Nessa toward her, and though Nessa was neither scared nor reluctant, she also knew there was no point in resisting. Some forces in life are so strong that the only thing you can do is submit.
As Nessa passed through the briars, not a single thorn scratched her, and when she emerged on the other side, she knew she’d found someone she’d needed to meet. Harriett was tall, her hair woven through with silvery strands that caught the moonlight. Despite the chill in the air, she’d removed her clothes. She stood naked before Nessa, her skin sprinkled with the soil of her garden. Magnificent flora sprouted from the earth all around her. Burdock, poppies, henbane, angel’s trumpet. Hanging from her arm was a basket filled with pale gray fungi that resembled the delicate hands of young girls.
“I’ve never seen mushrooms like those before,” Nessa said, figuring it wouldn’t be proper to acknowledge the woman’s nudity.
Harriett glanced down at them. “No, I suspect not,” she replied. “They aren’t native to this part of the world.”
“What are you going to do with them? They’re poisonous, I’d imagine.”
Harriett picked one up by the stem and twirled it between her fingers. “It depends how you define poisonous. There’s a very fine line between what cures and what kills. Come,” she said. “I don’t have many visitors. This will be fun for me. Let me show you around.”
Harriett led Nessa along a path that wound through the garden. Raised beds radiated in a spiral around a giant mound in the center of what had once been the lawn. Nessa wondered if it might be some sort of ritual altar.
“That’s where I perform the human sacrifices,” Harriett said, as though she’d been reading Nessa’s mind.
Nessa gulped comically and Harriett laughed.
“Kidding,” she said. “It’s a compost pile. Here in my garden, looks are deceiving. You must judge what you see with something other than your eyes.” She stopped by a patch of unimpressive waist-high weeds with toothed leaves. “These, for example, are stinging nettles. The leaves and stems are bristling with thousands of microscopic needles. When you brush against them, they deliver chemicals that cause a painful rash. Yet nettles are one of the most medicinally useful plants in the world. You can use them to treat everything from arthritis to diabetes.” She moved on to a shrub from which plump orange fruit dripped like teardrops. “This is an iboga plant from West Africa. Its extracts are used in other parts of the world to treat opioid addition. They’re illegal here in the United States.” Last, she pointed to a regal plant on the other side of the path, the top of its tall stem crowded with delicate purple flowers. “And that is a species of aconite, also known as monkshood or wolfsbane. Every part of it is highly toxic. Touching it will turn your fingers numb. Eat even the smallest bit, and you’ll suffocate on your own vomit. Growing beside it is holy basil, which has been used as a medicine for two millennia.”
Nessa looked around. There had to be thousands of different species planted in Harriett’s garden. “What do you plan to do with all of this?” she asked.
Harriett pondered the question as though it had never occurred to her. “Make things for those who have need of them, I suppose.”
“Or use them to punish men like Brendon Baker?” Nessa asked.
Harriett’s smile spread across her face, revealing a rather large gap between her two front teeth. “Perhaps,” she said.
“He deserved what he got. He’s not a good man.”
Harriett shrugged. “Good, bad—they’re mostly meaningless concepts. Baker is a pest,” she said. “I should have done worse. I guess I always still could.”
Nessa sensed the opportunity to get to the reason for her visit. “I met a woman like you when I was little.”
“You don’t say?” Harriett’s smile gave nothing away. “What kind of woman would that be?” She seemed to be daring Nessa to call her a witch. Nessa knew she needed to choose her words carefully.
“Her name was Miss Ella. She lived near my family down in South Carolina. My grandmother told me she’d worked as a librarian for thirty-five years. Then one day, Miss Ella left her husband and moved out of town and into her grandfather’s old shack in the middle of the swamp. The only things she took with her were her books. She taught herself how to make nature do her bidding. They said she could heal or kill depending on which mood struck her. An uncle of mine swore he’d once spied on Miss Ella talking to snakes.”
“I’ve never tried talking to a snake before,” Harriett said. The idea seemed to appeal to her.
“The point is, Miss Ella and my grandmother worked together sometimes. On projects, you might say. I was hoping you and I might do the same.”
“You have a project for me?” Harriett asked.
“There’s a dead girl down by the ocean who needs our help. She’s been calling to me, and she won’t be found unless I go look for her.” Nessa stopped and sighed. She’d never told anyone outside her family about the gift. She hadn’t even been able to confess to Jo. “I’m sorry. Does this all sound crazy?”
Nessa waited for Harriett’s reply. The woman had absorbed the information with no sign of incredulousness. Nessa had anticipated some healthy skepticism. But maybe it all seemed perfectly normal to a witch who preferred to do her gardening in the nude.
“If the dead girl’s been calling to you, why haven’t you gone to her?”
Nessa had wondered the same thing. She gave Harriett the only answer she’d found. “The gift wanted me to find you first. I think the situation might end up being dangerous. I was sent to another woman before you—one with powerful energy. I think she’ll be able to protect us.”
“So you’ll find the body. She’ll make use of her powerful energy. And what will I do?” Harriett asked.
“You’ll punish whoever’s responsible for killing the girl.”
Harriett nodded as if that was all very acceptable. “When can we start?” she asked.
“First thing tomorrow morning,” Nessa said.